PhilosophersFrancis Bacon

Francis Bacon

Knowledge is power: observe and experiment.

Empiricism1561 – 1626 United KingdomEmpiricistThinker of scientific methodEssayistStatesman

Overview Arguments · 4 Works Quotes Lineage

Inspirations

Aristote a "New Organon" against the syllogism, which discovers nothing

Démocrite the school that went furthest into nature

Platon a philosophy mixed with superstition, but a first sketch of induction

Heirs

Thomas Hobbes worked for him around 1620 (translations, dictation)

John Locke empiricism

Hume the experimental method applied to human nature

Denis Diderot the Encyclopédie takes over his classification of knowledge

Kant a sentence of Bacon's as the epigraph of the Critique of Pure Reason (1787)

Similar and opposite philosophers

how it is computed

Closest

Galileo Galilei Astronomer and physicist: he holds that nature is read through experiment and mathematics, and that Scripture speaks of salvation, not of the mechanics of the heavens.

George Berkeley Sensible things exist only by being perceived: there is no matter behind our ideas, only minds.

Ibn Khaldun Civilisations rise and fall with the strength of their solidarity.

William Alston God can be perceived as the world is perceived: a genuine source of knowledge.

Furthest

Richard Rorty Talk of sensations might one day disappear, replaced by the language of neuroscience.

John Leslie Mackie Evil makes belief in a God both all-powerful and wholly good incoherent.